Carlos Schwabe (Altona, 1866 - Avon, Seine-et-Marne, 1926) was a Symbolist painter born in Germany and raised in Geneva, Switzerland. In 1890 he visited Paris. The following year one of his first paintings, The Evening Bells, was noticed by Péladan who entrusted him with the task of designing the poster for the first Salon de la Rose+Croix. This poster, which shows two gauzily-clad women climbing the stairs that lead to the ideal, while a third figure, mired in materialism, looks on helplessly, contributed significantly to the success of the show.

Although Schwabe exhibited at only one of Péladan's salons, he placed his considerable gifts as a draftsman in the service of Symbolist literature and composed remarkable drawings, many of them enhanced with watercolours, for volumes of poetry by Baudelaire, Catulle Mendès, Albert Samain, Maurice Maeterlinck, Stéphane Mallarmé, and above all Emile Zola's La rêve, the only novel in the Rougon-Macquart cycle devoted to the transcendent.

Combining the influences of Dürer, Hokusai, and the Pre-Raphaelites, Schwabe's meticulous, analytic draftsmanship lends a definite meaning to each detail. Thus the flowers and plants he drew from nature at different stages of their life - their budding, blossoming, and withering - appear as so many symbolic correlatives of human existence. Haunted by the notions of virginal purity and death, Schwabe painted watercolours and oils whose cold tones and themes are strange indeed.

Title page and illustration for «Words of a Believer» by F. Lammenais"

His masterpiece is The Death of the Grave-Digger (1895), depicting an angel of death with long green scythe-like wings come to fetch an old man who is digging a grave. Nor is this the only picture in which Schwabe gave death a woman's features (those of his own wife); there is The Day of the Dead/Grief and The Wave, which, with hindsight, seems a premonition of the chaos of World War One, with its unfurling wave of screaming women's faces. The preliminary charcoal sketches for that disturbing work bear witness to the exceptional graphic gifts of this secretive painter who unhappily was unable to renew his art and wound up becoming a rather caricatural figure of the Symbolist artist trapped in an imagery - lilies and spiritlike figures - that was quickly outmoded after the turn of the century.

Biographical information from here, complemented with the record of the artist in Wiki. You can enjoy more works by Schwabe in Wikimedia Commons and for example in the website of theMusée d'art et d'histoire (Geneva, Switzerland).

Second post dedicated to this fantastic Chinese artist born in 1957 in northern China and immigrated to Canada in 1991. This time paintigs of his series "Yang" and "Portraits". I refer to previous post for more images and information about his life and work.

"The old masters of oil paintings have developed their techniques to perfection; and the masters of modern art have extended their styles to an extreme. Wittgenstein remarked about language: "If only you do not try to utter what is unutterable then nothing gets lost. And the unutterable will be contained in what has been uttered." I believe, when it comes to the fields of fine arts -- what is utterable has mostly been uttered."

"In my opinion, the borderlines dividing language, science, common sense and the arts are disappearing gradually. I see convergence bringing about an integrated cultural world, and my works are an attempt to present such a vision of the integrating world to our senses. For me, this is the utterable element still unuttered."

"Modernity appears to me like a tin bucket in which every possible style has been poured and mixed and used and abused in search of self-expression. A child can express himself with crayons and doddles. But great art could not be pure self-expression; it's unfortunately the opposite. When an art piece is placed in a position of great art, it's the unselfish erasing of the painter that lets it live, as T.S.Eliot has said, «the process of creation is the process of constantly removing one's character and individuality from the work»."

"What's left of ME in my paintings then is the combination of other people's rules and technique and my psychological perception of reality. I don't try to be ancient or modern. I could only paint within the continuity of a tradition and with a simple mission: to paint the ever-lasting mythopoetic images of our time as they come out of the past and move into the future."

lunes, 29 de julio de 2013

Textos en inglés marcados con [*] en cada párrafo /Texts in english at the end of this post, quoted by [*] in each paragraph.__________________________________________________Dix, Rivera y algunos retratos perdidos.Dix, Rivera and a few lost portraits.

But the deliberate destruction of works is not just a matter of politics but also of aesthetics ... even when in the following case this has much to do with the political image of the character portrayed.

Unlike many works on display, this one avoided official controversy although it clearly blamed the military for butchering a generation. Others on display were not as fortunate. The military filed charges of insult against several artists at the exhibition.

When Hitler rose to power, Dix was forbidden to exhibit his work but Nazis were under no such restriction. In 1933, this painting was siezed and displayed in the Nazi's Degenerate Art exhibition. It was captioned, "Slander against the German Heroes of the World War."

The painting was purchased from Karl Nierendorf by the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in 1923, and later acquired by the Stadtmuseum and Gemäldegalerie, Dresden. It was confiscated by Nazis in 1933, and exhibited in Room 3 (National Socialist inventory number 16001) of the Entartete Kunst exhibition of degenerate art held in Munich in 1937 under the title Der Krieg (The War). It is presumed to have been destroyed.The purchase of The Trench by the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum caused such an outcry that it forced the resignation of the museum's curator Hans Secker, and the return of the painting to Nierendorf. In 1924 it was exhibited in the anti-war exhibition, Nie Wieder Krieg (No More War). The composition and theme of The Trench would later be reworked as the central panel of Dix's triptych, Die Krieg (The War), now in the Gemäldegalerie Neue Meister, Dresden.

[3]

In 1931, Diego Rivera met Nelson Rockefeller after his Museum of Modern Art opened to the public and began talking about a prospective project for the Rockefeller Center. Rockefeller agreed to be a co-sponsor for the project.The true benefactor of the mural was the Todd-Robertson-Todd Corporation. They decided to place the mural in the “Great Hall” of the Rockefeller Center. From that meeting they reached an agreement and Rivera was set to continue his work regarding capitalism and the rising industrial system taking control of the economy in America. After initial negotiations, Rivera then talked to the architects to establish his limitations.

[4a]The main problem with the Rockefeller mural was the depiction of Vladimir Ilych Lenin. Diego was forced to stop painting, after only working a complete month on the mural. Rivera’s communist idealism came to be a very huge legal problem.Nelson Rockefeller sent a letter to Rivera: “I noticed that in the most recent portion of the painting you had included a portrait of Lenin. The piece is beautifully painted, but it seems to me that this portrait…might very easily offend a great many people…. As much as I dislike to do so, I am afraid we must ask you to substitute the face of some unknown man where Lenin’s face now appears.” Rivera refused, and his contract was terminated on May 9, 1933. The mural was quickly covered with a white canvas. Months later the Rockefellers had the mural hammered off the walls on February 9, 1934.

[4b]Left. Rivera's Man at the Crossroads covered with canvas. May 1933. RCA building, Rockefeller Center, New York. Photograph by Lucienne BlochRight. Demonstration at Rockefeller Center in protest of Rivera's dismissal from the mural commission. May 18, 1933. Photograph by New York Daily News

[4c]Within hours of learning about Rivera's cease-to-work order, a crowd of protesters gathers outside the RCA building. In coming days, the Rockefellers receive a flood of letters from across the country, some commending Rivera's dismissal, others pleading that he be allowed to finish the mural.

[5]An assistant, Lucienne Bloch, had taken photographs of the mural before it was destroyed. Using them as a reference, Rivera repainted the mural, though at a smaller scale, at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City where it was renamed Man, Controller of the Universe.______________________________________There are remarkable parallels between these two works and fate. Both were absurdly destroyed by regimes whose values ​​questioned. Both were rebuilt by its creators after all this destruction and almost in the same years.

[6]In 1954, Graham Sutherland was commissioned to paint a full-length portrait of Sir Winston Churchill. The 1,000 guineas fee for the painting was funded by donations from members of the House of Commons and House of Lords, and was presented to Churchill by both Houses of Parliament at a public ceremony in Westminster Hall on his 80th birthday on 30 November 1954.Churchill hated the portrait. After the public presentation, the painting was taken to his country home at Chartwell but was not put on display. After the death of Lady Churchill in 1977, it became clear that she had destroyed the painting some months after it was delivered.

[7]

Churchill was an elder statesman in 1954, then towards the end of his second period as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Sutherland had a reputation as a modernist painter with some recent successful portraits, such as Somerset Maugham in 1949. He was drawn to capturing the real person: some sitters considered his disinclination to flattery as a form of cruelty or disparagement.

[8]The presentation ceremony at Westminster Hall was recorded by the BBC. In his acceptance speech, Churchill remarked on the unprecedented honour shown to him, and described the painting (in a remark often considered a backhanded compliment) as "a remarkable example of modern art", combining "force with candour". Other reactions were mixed, with some critics praising the strength of its likeness, but others condemned it as a disgrace.

[9]

There are more examples of portraits destroyed by the sitters who disliked it, for example the portrait of French playwright Alfred Jarry painted by Henri Rousseau. I am not aware if there are photographs of this work.

Neither of the portrait Lucian Freud made of Bernard Breslauer, a dealer in antique books. In the news, published by the Daily Telegraph in August 2008, we read that"The painting of Bernard Breslauer, a millionaire antiquarian book dealer, was finished more than 50 years ago and Freud was anxious for it to be included in the exhibition in London next month.But after a long search Freud was devastated to discovered that the painting had been destroyed by Breslauer who took over the family business after his father died when their Bloomsbury flat was destroyed in the Blitz.Mr Breslauer, apparently, objected to the way Freud had painted his distinctive double chin."[10]Although perhaps the best example in terms of destruction of portraits is the case of the American painter Thomas Eakins. As we read in the book of Henry Adams:"Almost invariably, Eakins's portraits were poorly received. Four of Eakins's commisioned portraits were rejected. That of the President Rutherford Hayes were destroyed. In 1899 the colleagues of Dean James W. Holland objected to the dean's "tense almos haggard expression" and refused to pay for it. As Holland's son explained, Eakins, "having no general market at that time... as a friendly gesture gave the picture to my mother". In two cases, those of Robert Ogden and Atwater Lee, the sitters agreed to pay Eakins's fee, but never diplayed them; one returned the portrait to Eakins's studio.Most often, Eakins would simply give the portraits he had painted to the sitter or the sitter's family, often with an accompanying inscription. Many never bothered to pick up their portraits. Others destroyed the gift. Eakins painted both James and George Wood, the sons of his physician Dr. Horatio C. Wood, but both portraits have disappeared. George wrote to Goodrich: "He painted a portrait of me was quite 'Eakineeze', so much so that my family got it lost". In 1903 Eakins gave a portrait of his former pupil, Frank W. Stokes, to his family, who destroyed it. The same fate met his portrait of the pugilist Charlie McKeever, which Eakins gave to the fighter's mother. John Singer Sargent (or his family) misplaced or destroyed the portrait that Eakins gave him of their mutual friend Dr. J. William White. Similary, the Buckley family destroyed the painting of Edward S. Buckley that Eakins painted in 1906. His daughter wrote: "It was so unsatisfactory that we destroyed it not wishing his descendants to think of their grandfather as resemblign such a portrait." Mary Waldon, the Superior of the Order of the Sisters of Mercy, did not like her portrait by Eakins and called in another painter, William Antrim, to paint one that was more pleasing. Antrim took the Eakins portrait off its stretcher and "tossed" in into the attic of his studio, where it was subsequently lost."

This is an open art blog, so you could find images eventually offensive or umconfortable.

If you're an artist and find here images of your art you want to be removed, just tell me and I'll do it immediately. I try to ask for permission always if artist is alive and there's a way to contact, bot not always is possible and there are things I think worth to be known.

In any case, the copyrights of all the images contained in this blog, except where noted, belong to the artists or the legal owners of such rights, and have been published nonprofit and for the only purpose of make the works known to the general public.

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